I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving feasts. apparently, a lot of folks ate and ran for their cars – not to get home before Aunt Sally passed out but to the stores to get a head start on their shopping for the next holidays. I was really surprised about how the Thanksgiving Day newspaper had several pounds worth of ads, in many cases for sales that would be over before many of us were getting out of bed on Friday.
One mistake anyone commenting on things can make is to assume that the way in which we see the world is the norm, and so while I’d never ponder running to a store to try to be one of the lucky 10 people who actually can get the $2 waffle iron (hopefully without a dose of pepper spray as occurred in some places), I know others do. But while retail sales were up vs. a year ago, comScore reported something interesting occurring over the weekend.

While the brick and mortar places were busy, their servers weren’t exactly idle:

comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported U.S. retail e-commerce spending for the first 25 days of the November – December 2011 holiday season. For the holiday season-to-date, $12.7 billion has been spent online, marking a 15-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. Black Friday (November 25) saw $816 million in online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26-percent increase versus Black Friday 2010. Thanksgiving Day (November 24), while traditionally a lighter day for online holiday spending, achieved a strong 18-percent increase to $479 million.

I can’t remember the last time I did any holiday shopping outside of my home. I suspect that with 80% of tablet usage occurring in the home (a lot of it while watching TV), and the growth of tablets overall during the last year, we’re going to see a lot more growth in the already large online shopping numbers this year. What easier way to respond to a cool gift idea you see on TV than to buy it on the spot?

We sat around after dinner Thursday and enjoyed each other’s company. Call me old school, but I think the shopping can wait a day (or in my case, until about 10 days before the gifts are to be handed over). Given the strong online numbers on a traditional heavy retail day, I may not be alone in thinking to burp before buying.